Czech student film wins prize at Cannes festival

Congratulations to Zuzana Špidlová!  Her film Bába was awarded the top prize for the best student and youth film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

Slovak, Czech ForMins want youth to better know the other language

Even though the Czech and Slovak languages are similar, Czech and Slovak children are having a more difficult time understanding each other’s language.

New British star Susan Boyle to record her CD in Prague

Susan Boyle, Britain’s Got Talent runner-up and YouTube video star, will record her CD with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, according to idnes.cz.

George Lucas appeals for Czech filming incentives

Tax incentives have been discussed before.  Will a law be passed to help the Czech film industry compete with European countries that have them?

We went to Petřín on Sunday and as we were walking down the steps toward the Castle, we passed by a sign informing visitors that the Large Garden Tunnel (one of the underground passages beneath Petřín) was having a special open day. I thought the English translation on the sign was priceless!

Here’s my discovery of the day: It is not Czech!

It really wasn’t making any sense to me. Whenever I’ve watched a Borat episode on HBO, I’ve wondered why Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakh character greets the viewers with the very Czech sounding Jagshemash. What does Kazakhstan have to do with the Czech Republic? Did Mr. Cohen decide to throw all those “Eastern Europeans” into one basket and make them all speak one language?

Today I discovered that the phrase is not meant to be Czech, but instead is supposed to be the Polish Jak się masz, which of course sounds very similar to Jak se máš. Ok then. So it isn’t Czech. Good. But why Polish??

There’s a Borat dictionary at Boyakasha.co.uk.

I read an article in the Prague Daily Monitor this week that was overflowing with the word server. There would be nothing wrong with that had the article been about servers, or at least one server. But the article wasn’t about servers. It was about a website. Here are a few excerpts from the text:

“Many mistakes on server promoting Czech Republic”
“The newly-launched internet server www.czech.cz, aimed to promote the Czech Republic…”
“The server is mainly designed for foreign tourists…”

I’d probably leave the article alone had it not become the proverbial last straw. For some reason, Czechs seem to have a particular liking for using the word server when referring to a website, so I read or hear about a server www this or www that or about someone “running a server about something” a lot more often than I’d like to. And now this article comes along…